Spirits in Stone: The Secrets of Megalithic America

I dedicate this book to my father, Gerald Kreisberg, who passed away during the course of this project.

He always instilled in our family and me the simple strength of truth and knowledge.

SPIRITS IN

STONE

"Archaeoastronomy does not have to be incredibly difficult. In fact it can be fun! Guided by Glenn Kreisberg’s aptly titled Spirits in Stone, even the untrained reader can share in the excitement of discovery experienced by some of the foremost explorers of Native American and pre-Columbian stone structures in the Northeast. This is a clear, easy-to-follow introduction to a field that was once shrouded in secrecy and clouded by conflicting opinions. Many readers will be shocked by their own proximity to ancient cultures as they turn these pages. I truly recommend this book, especially to young explorers who sense that the old history books are wrong but don’t know where to begin. Begin here!"

EVAN T. PRITCHARD, DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR ALGONQUIN CULTURE AND AUTHOR OF NATIVE NEW YORKERS AND BIRD MEDICINE

Kreisberg’s work will contribute greatly to demonstrating the fact that not only did Native Americans construct impressive stone structures throughout the eastern United States but that these sites are sacred and an integral part of their cultural traditions and should be protected!

HARRY HOLSTEIN, PROFESSOR OF ARCHAEOLOGY AT JACKSONVILLE STATE UNIVERSITY, ALABAMA

"Reading Glenn Kreisberg’s deeply and thoughtfully researched book, I can hear Joseph Campbell intoning the words of Hermes Trismegistus, from the Emerald Tablet, ‘As Above, so Below!’ If you want to understand the truths of prehistory, look for the writings of the heavens on the earth. Spirits in Stone shows us how very substantial the insubstantial lore of mythology can be, in the very caves and megalithic sites of northeastern America. The ground we walk on is hallowed ground!"

STEPHEN LARSEN, PH.D., DIRECTOR OF THE STONE MOUNTAIN COUNSELING CENTER AND COAUTHOR OF THE TRANSFORMATIONAL POWER OF DREAMING

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are too many people to name individually, who either by direct contact or indirect influence assisted in what went into this book. Ah, this way I don’t risk leaving out someone truly important in this endeavor. Whether leading me to a new site, providing a site report or map to aid in discovering a new site, or spending time discussing and pondering site features or aspects that play into the bigger picture, this has been entirely a collaborative effort. This has also been an adventure, an outdoor adventure at that, and I am thankful for the companionship of close friends and family on those adventurous treks into the woods. Some of you may appear in this book, and others are included in spirit. You know who you are.

Additional to my writings in this volume are included contributed essays from Ros Strong, David Johnson, and Dave Gutkowski, each bringing a voice, perspective, and unique experience and expertise that allow us to share in a special gift and insight. Ros’s translation and commentary on the work of French researcher Pierre Mereaux introduces us to important research translated into English for the first time. David’s groundbreaking research is leading the way for Native American tribal nations to rediscover lost links to the watery underworld, and Dave’s personal story of the discovery and documentation of an archaeoastronomy site in the Northeast provides hope and assurance that barriers are being broken when it comes to academic acceptance of landscape archaeology. Together these researchers bring something special to this project I simply could not, and I thank them. Additionally, I would like to thank my sister, Shari Kreisberg Therrien, for the additional translation work she provided on previously untranslated work and writings of Pierre Mereaux.

Last, but not at all least, I want to thank Jon Graham, Patricia Rydle, and all the kind folks at Inner Traditions for their eternal patience and steadfast confidence and guidance in seeing this project through. The work they do bringing cutting-edge thinking and spiritual research to the eye of the public is truly appreciated and revered in my mind.

CONTENTS

Cover Image

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

SECTION I. Exploring Ceremonial Stone Landscapes and Cultural Features: Their Practical Purpose and Spiritual Connection

Chapter 1. On the Neolithic in North America: Maritime Cultures and Mastodon Manipulation

CALIFORNIA’S ANCIENT MARITIME HERITAGE

Chapter 2. Mysteries in Stone: The Big Picture

Chapter 3. The Hammonasset Line: A Solstice Line across the Land

Chapter 4. Serpent of the North: The Overlook Mountain/Draco Correlation

HISTORY AND DESCRIPTION OF THE SITE

COMPARATIVE AND DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS

NATIVE STONE CONSTRUCTION

SERPENT MOUND AND CAMBODIAN TEMPLE CONNECTION

DRACO AND MYTHOLOGY

THUBAN, THE ONCE AND FUTURE POLE STAR

INITIAL CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER INQUIRY

Chapter 5. Cairns and Ceremonial Stone Sites in the Catskills

CAIRN SITES AND CAIRN COMPLEXES

Chapter 6. Turtles, Eyes, and Compass Stones

THE EYES HAVE IT

COMPASS STONES OF THE CATSKILLS AND SHAWANGUNK MOUNTAINS

THE ONTEORA LAKE COMPASS STONE

THE NORTH SHAWANGUNK DOLMEN

PEEKAMOOSE STONE/RECONNOITER ROCK

THE PETERSKILL COMPASS STONE

LAKE MINNEWASKA COMPASS STONE

Chapter 7. Frost Valley Inscriptions: More Ancient Mysteries in the Mountains

HUNTER MOUNTAIN—A SACRED SITE

ABOUT THE RESEARCHERS

Chapter 8. Alignments in the Northeast: Native, Natural, or Nonsense?

SOLSTICE AND EQUINOX ABBREVIATIONS

SIGNIFICANT SOLSTICE AND EQUINOX ALIGNMENT LOCATIONS

ALIGNMENTS

DEVIL’S TOMBSTONE, NEW YORK; SPRUCETON VALLEY, NEW YORK; MANITOU ISLAND, MICHIGAN, WSSR/SSSS

KINGSTON MEGALITHS

KINGSTON MEGALITHS/HAMMONASSET LINE INTERSECTION, NORTON ROAD, SSSR/WSSS/WSSR/SSSS

A CLOSER VIEW OF THE INTERSECTION LOCATION BETWEEN NORTON AND YANTZ ROADS IN RED HOOK, NEW YORK

SHAWANGUNK/PEEKAMOOSE ALIGNMENT, WSSR/SSSS

BONTICOU STONE/FROST VALLEYALIGNMENT, SSSR/WSSR/SSSS

MILLBROOK MOUNTAIN STONE ROW ALIGNMENT, WSSR/SSSS

PLATEAU MOUNTAIN CALENDAR STONES I AND II, WSSS

LA | LATVJU SAULE NE

BURNT HILLS/TURNERS FALLS/BEAR’S DEN CHAMBER, WSSR/SSSS

SECTION II. Spirits in Stone, Science in Stone

Chapter 9. Council Rock Mountain by Dave Gutkowski

Chapter 10. The Ancestral Native Americans’ Sacred Landscape by David Johnson

INTRODUCTION

SACRED LANDSCAPE, CEREMONIAL STONE LANDSCAPES, AND HABITATIONSCAPES

MY SACRED LANDSCAPE RESEARCH DATA AND OBSERVATIONS

Chapter 11. Carnac: Stones for the Living—Pierre Mereaux’s Classic Work Translation and Commentary by Ros Strong

PART I

PART II

SELECTED GLOSSARY

ADDITIONAL MEREAUX TRANSLATIONS

Chapter 12. The Mystery of Orbs and the Work of Paul C. Muir

Chapter 13. Mission Malta: Exploring Sound and Energy Properties of Ancient Architecture

UNDERSTANDING FORMANTS

SOUND FOR DIFFERENT PURPOSES

ADDITIONAL SOURCES

SECTION III. Spirits on the Land: Landscape Archaeology and Archaeoastronomy

Chapter 14. Woodstock’s Main Streets Act as a Giant Compass and Cosmic Calendar

Chapter 15. Dancing with the Devil, Dancing with the Sun: A Solstice Star Rise Alignment on the Hudson River

ABSTRACT

THE DEVIL’S DANCE CHAMBER

LANDSCAPE ASTRONOMY

LANDSCAPES AND SKYSCAPES

CONCLUSION

FURTHER RESEARCH

Chapter 16. Stones and Stars Symposium: A Watershed Event Hosted at Colgate University

Chapter 17. The Megalithic Revival: The Raising of Sophia

Chapter 18. Site Preservation, Protection, Conservation, and Education

NOTES FROM THE SACRED SITE POLICY DRAFT REPORT

Chapter 19. Concluding by Looking Forward

LESSON IN STONES

FURTHER COMMENTS ON THE ROCK STRUCTURES

Footnotes

References

About the Author

About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company

Books of Related Interest

Copyright & Permissions

Index

FOREWORD

Graham Hancock

I’ve had the privilege of exploring ancient cultural stone sites of the American Northeast during a ramble or two in the backwoods, walking the walk through hidden landscapes, with Glenn Kreisberg.

I say hidden landscapes quite deliberately, because Glenn is among those of us who contend that modern, technological, twenty-first-century America sits amid the ruins and remnants of an advanced, mysterious, and remotely ancient culture—the unrecognized and unacknowledged high culture of the Native Americans themselves. Yet in many cases the surviving fragments of their legacy—and fragments are all we have—are so different, and so strange to our eyes, conditioned by our particular kind of technology and by the reductionist/materialist bias of Western science, that we literally fail to see them.

What my rambles with Glenn have shown me, however, and what this book will reveal to you, are that those fragments are indeed present, even in the intensively settled, heavily farmed, and economically developed Northeast where the barbaric forces of modernization have been at work the longest, erasing and confusing the record of stone. What is needed is what Glenn brings to the endeavor—the eye to see them and a deep understanding of the very different, very ancient, system of ideas that inspired their creation. Then, suddenly, a meaningful and coherent picture comes into view.

We today, in the midst of our built urban environments, do not see the stars, or if we see them it is rarely and through a glass darkly because the intense light pollution generated by our cities and beltways and industrial zones obscures the sky. But for the ancients things were different. Not because they were primitive, but as result of a profound understanding of the human condition, and as a matter of informed choice, they lived amid an enchanted landscape in which underworld and earth and sky were all intimately connected, and in which it was a sacred duty for humans to keep and tend the earth, to revere and wonder at the majesty of the heavens, to trace out and harness the lines of energy running through the planetary body, and to reaffirm its marriage to the cosmos at key moments of the year.

The Hermetic maxim as above so below can be applied in ancient North America just as strongly and with just such energizing, healing, and soul-enriching effects as it applied in the sacred megalithic centers of the archaic Old World. It is therefore very much to the point that Spirits in Stone does not confine itself to the enigmas of the American Northeast but also spreads a wider net to encompass sites such as Carnac in Brittany and the megalithic temples of Malta, where the exact same principles of cosmic and earthly harmony are shown to have been at work.

What is different in America is only the scale of destruction of this ancient worldwide system, deliberate destruction, pursued for short-term economic gains, by rude and barbarous incomers whose cultures had been cut off from the wellsprings of planetary wisdom for so long that they were literally unable to see the pearls of great price that they so carelessly and callously swept away.

We, their descendants, need not be so blind. Thanks to the efforts of Glenn Kreisberg and others, the sacred landscapes are little by little being made visible to us again, and there is hope that the system of cosmic enchantment that they enshrine, to which Native American cultures stand closer than perhaps any others on Earth, may yet be recovered.

Enjoy Spirits in Stone. I highly recommend this book. Take it with you on your own rambles through the backwoods.

GRAHAM HANCOCK

GRAHAM HANCOCK is a reporter and lecturer who has appeared on numerous radio and television shows and is the author of more than fifty books, including the international bestsellers Magicians of the Gods, The Sign and the Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods, and Heaven’s Mirror (with Santha Faiia).

PREFACE

AN UNKNOWN PURPOSE IN AN UNKNOWN TIME

Every ceremonial stone site and extended cultural landscape is unique to itself. Like a fingerprint, no two are the same or tell exactly the same story regarding to whom they belong. Deciphering their true origins, purposes, and meanings is the subject of this book. In the past, researchers have overlooked the stone structures and sites constructed by ancient Native Americans in the northeastern United States, sometimes claiming that there are no such places. Spirits in Stone shows that the archaeological history of the Northeast is just as important as that of other, more recognized areas of the country, such as the Southwest, the Midwest, and the lower Mississippi valley.

Across much of the Earth’s surface are many mysterious earthworks and stone monuments built for an unknown purpose, in an unknown time. Their shared features suggest that many were originally part of a universal system, and in this book I argue that they served a belief system and offer evidence of and speculation on an elemental science that was practiced by an archaic civilization, which more and more is revealing itself and coming into view.

In this connection, a most significant recent discovery in the American Northeast is that of intentional site alignments or leys, a mysterious network of straight lines that link the ancient places of the Northeast and have their counterparts in Europe, China, Australia, South America, and elsewhere.

Spirits in Stone takes you on a guided tour, exploring some of these fascinating stone structure sites where standing megaliths, oriented calendar stones, carefully constructed cairn fields, effigy petroforms, and geoglyphs align over great distances, both physically and symbolically, to reveal a hidden pattern. What’s revealed is a pattern that offers new insight and meaning to a long-lost culture in northeast North America, a culture with a sophisticated three-dimensional worldview connecting the underworld with the Earth plane of the living and the sky, horizon, and heavens above.

STONE GIANTS

Rising from the pure earth,

Where once the stars did gather overhead,

the stones of time weather and wait,

remembering what the wise men said.

See through the fields the figures dance,

’round standing stone on sacred hill.

The solemn white-robed figures wait-

Re-animate the cell, the will;

Know purpose and a promise,

(star pattern on the ground),

Repeat the cosmic rhythm,

Reflect the cosmic sound.

Men plow the fields while monuments

Silent shout of ancient days!

Curious we look and blandly wait

For truth to pierce our downward gaze.

JOAN ZINK, THE ANCIENT STONES SPEAK

INTRODUCTION

AN EXPRESSION OF THEIR WORLDVIEW

The subject matter of this book deals with the physical, material, and metaphysical or spiritual nature of the stone constructions and other unusual land features found in the backwoods of America’s Northeast. These structures represent the direct and indirect evidence left on the landscape by past cultures. About prehistoric times, which for most parts of the world are no more than a few centuries ago, it is from that scant material evidence and in many cases that evidence alone by which we must inform ourselves. To learn about the cultures that made these past structures, we work as best we can from those material remains that are available to us.

Among the most appealing and the most direct of those material traces, in the way they seem to speak to us, are the many historic and prehistoric stone constructions, carefully built stone mounds, foundations, walls, effigies, chambers, and standing stones, and their apparent and observed alignments. Some person or persons from the past or distant past expressed their vision of the world in that material object. When that expression miraculously survives into our own time, we can see that same stone construction, investigate it, and understand the message it contains and perhaps recover and share an ancient story or vision.

But it’s never easy. Under the best of circumstances, when the history is detailed and clear, we can hope to be sure about the history. Other circumstances and situations offer a message that is more elusive, and few are more elusive than an isolated, nondescript pile of rocks or row of stones. The essentials of geometry that make up alignments and human and animal shapes are simple enough, which is why people chance to see faces, animals, and geometric patterns in a cloud or cliff face or stain on the wall. Certainly, twentieth-century art has taught us that the variety of depictions of human and animal figures and geometric shapes is nearly infinite in the mind of the shaper. So how is one to know, when one perceives an alignment or a human or animal form in a prehistoric stone construction, whether one has understood the origin and purpose of the construction as directly intended by the long-dead minds that shaped the form?

A step beyond understanding the intended purpose of a construction is to grasp the vision, not just of what it means to us, but what it meant to its maker. A stone wall, yes, or an aligned boulder, but what did the wall mean to those who built it? Where did it point and why? What did it enclose or delineate? What did the boulder align with, and what lesson or story did it hold? What immortal thought or belief is framed in the ancient undertaking?

Interested though prehistorians are in these matters, most feel there is no reliable way to grasp these things. We may marvel at the simple elegance of an undulating stone wall leading to a boulder. We might nickname this a serpent wall because it reminds us of a snake or serpentine creature. But we struggle to come up with who the snake maker was. We would like to know if that person was considered a god or a mortal, young or old, an artist or a joker, but little in the material we study seems able to tell us.

The choice, then, is often between safe silence and a risky attempt to reach out and grasp at the unknowable. Where most are silent, a few prehistorians have followed the more dangerous, higher path. James W. Mavor Jr. and Byron E. Dix were two. Notable for the sober reliability of their fieldwork throughout all of their careers and for the vigor with which they brushed aside visions of the past that made no sense, they literally wrote the book on recognizing prehistoric stone constructions, forms, and alignments, and their meanings: Manitou: The Sacred Landscape of New England’s Native Civilization.

There are pitfalls: Are those forms and alignments, all of them, intended as the forms and functions assigned to them? Are these constructions, for all their variety and all their range in space and time, not just the cairns, effigies, or alignments of a particular people, or a particular person, but a pursuit of all people, everywhere? Was there a worldwide rock cult and a rock god? Could the deity have been the stone itself? If so, then the domain of this commanding deity ran for thousands of years and for thousands of miles, from every corner on Earth.

To most prehistorians, Mavor and Dix’s Manitou is a curiosity: the general ambition is unsafe, the particular course improbable. Most prehistorians today do not recognize, accept, or credit an ancient indigenous population in the northeastern United States with having built in stone or with creating stone constructions that align with and memorialize events in the sky. And this to me seems most improbable and why Manitou is still to be taken seriously and why new editions are published and welcome, to satiate the appetite for information on this subject. That high and dangerous path, for all its risks, is an important part of the way we try to grasp knowledge of prehistoric antiquity. And though they have both passed, it would warm the hearts of Mavor and Dix to know that researchers today, including many northeastern Native American tribal preservation officers, roam the woods with dog-eared copies of Manitou, searching for significant cultural resources to identify as sacred.

It appears that ancient cultures in parts of the northeastern United States, at one time, surveyed their territories extensively, identifying natural objects such as large boulders and erratics to exploit or use them as part of their belief system, if the objects fit or if they could make them fit. So the coincidences we’re seeing may have been noted by others as well, long ago, and used in some way as an expression of their worldview.

SECTION I

Exploring Ceremonial Stone Landscapes and Cultural Features

Their Practical Purpose and Spiritual Connection

CHAPTER 1

ON THE NEOLITHIC IN NORTH AMERICA

Maritime Cultures and Mastodon Manipulation

What did the Stone Age in Neolithic America mean to those who were here? Midwestern, southwestern, Mexican, Central American, and South American cultures built in stone and aligned their lithic constructions to the heavens. That Northeast Native culture is denied similar credit is a terrible disservice that undermines the sophistication, ingenuity, and abilities of ancient northeastern Native populations.

When we think of the Stone Age in ancient America what comes to mind are groups of hunter-gatherers wandering the landscape, clad in animal skins, struggling against the elements to survive.

The first humans to appear in the Western Hemisphere, perhaps some twenty-five thousand years ago or longer, came from other areas on Earth where human development had been taking place for many millennia. In Across the Atlantic Ice, Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley’s Solutrean hypothesis puts sophisticated and advanced maritime-centered humans crossing the Atlantic in early transoceanic voyages in an early wave of migration and in the peopling of America.

The East Coast’s Red Paint culture and West Coast and maritime region’s Paleolithic cultures also speak to the sophistication and high level of civilization attained by ancient North American populations.

If the 5,300-year-old Tyrolean iceman found in 1991 in the Italian Alps is any indication of the sophistication of early man, by that time it seems the elements had been tamed by individuals who had an array of tools available that made it possible to travel through harsh environments with assured confidence.

From the coasts of America, up the river systems, by 10,000 BCE, we should not be surprised to see population centers established in proximity to vast, renewable resources, allowing sustainability and giving rise to the Adena, Hopewell, and Mississippian cultures in the Midwest and the eastern woodlands.

Today, the best surviving features of the Hopewell tradition era are mounds built for uncertain purposes. Great geometric earthworks are some of the most impressive Native American monuments from American prehistory. Eastern woodland mounds have various geometric shapes and rise to impressive heights. The function of the mounds is still under debate. Due to considerable evidence and surveys, plus the good survival condition of the largest mounds, more information can be obtained.

Several scientists, including Bradley T. Lepper, curator of archaeology for the Ohio Historical Society, hypothesize that the Octagon Earthwork, which is part of the Newark Earthworks at Newark, Ohio, was a lunar observatory oriented to the 18.6-year cycle of minimum and maximum lunar risings and settings on the local horizon. John Eddy, Ph.D., completed an unpublished survey in 1978 and proposed a lunar major alignment for the Octagon. Ray Hively and Robert Horn of Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, were the first researchers to analyze numerous lunar sightlines at the Newark Earthworks (1982) and the High Banks Works (1984) in Chillicothe, Ohio (Hively and Horn 2008). Christopher Turner noted that the Fairground Circle in Newark, Ohio, aligns to the sunrise on May 4; that is, that it marks the May cross-quarter sunrise (Turner 1982). In 1983, Turner demonstrated that the Hopeton Earthworks encode various sunrise and moonrise patterns, including the winter and summer solstices, the equinoxes, the cross-quarter days, the lunar maximum events, and the lunar minimum events (Turner 1983).

William F. Romain, Ph.D., of Ohio State University has written an article on the subject of astronomers, geometers, and magicians at the earthworks (Romain 2005).

Many of the mounds also contain various types of burials.

Although the origins of the Hopewell culture are still under discussion, there is probably not a lot that we can know or reasonably find out.

Hopewell populations seem to have originated in western New York and moved south into Ohio, where they built on the local Adena mortuary tradition. Or the Hopewell culture was said to have originated in western Illinois and spread by diffusion to southern Ohio. Similarly, the Havana Hopewell tradition was thought to have spread up the Illinois River and into southwestern Michigan, spawning Goodall Hopewell (Dancey and Pacheco 1997).

The name Hopewell was applied by Warren K. Moorehead after his explorations of the Hopewell Mound Group in Ross County, Ohio, in 1891 and 1892. The mound group itself was named for the family that owned the earthworks at the time. It is unknown what any of the various groups now defined as Hopewellian called themselves (Turner 1983, Romain 2005).

A case can be made for a far more sophisticated and well-developed culture with a complicated belief system and worldview. City centers, religious ceremonial activities, observation astronomy, and artistic pursuits were all elements of this high culture.

CALIFORNIA’S ANCIENT MARITIME HERITAGE

Although formal exploration has only recently begun, two basic types of cultural sites have been located in the underwater environment of California. They are Native American archaeological sites (and objects), and historic-era shipwrecks, cargo spills, or landing sites. California has a rich and varied maritime history. Native California peoples lived in large, settled villages along the Pacific coastline for many centuries before European contact. In some areas, such as along the Santa Barbara Channel and San Francisco Bay, these villages developed highly sophisticated technology for the time, with widespread trade using Native watercraft. Boat construction reached its highest development in California among the Chumash. Their plank canoe, called a tomol, impressed early European explorers of the California coast for its versatility and seaworthiness. Recent dating of middens on San Clemente Island (some sixty miles offshore) has documented an ancient maritime culture dating back some eight thousand years, perhaps earlier. Trading expeditions from the mainland to the Channel Islands to obtain steatite for soapstone bowls and effigy figurines were common. The remains of this prehistoric seafaring are being recorded by underwater archaeologists in quantities of artifacts recovered and preserved from the offshore areas. At least twenty-five individual sites have been reported between Ventura Beach and Point Conception. A recent exploration of Goleta State Beach yielded six stone bowls in one dive. Many other similar sites no doubt await discovery.

The lakes and rivers of California also contain valuable prehistoric sites. Fish traps at Ahjumawi Lava Springs State Park demonstrate the systematic management and harvest of suckers by Native people. Submerged bedrock mortars in Emerald Bay await dating and interpretation. Other submerged sites and preserved prehistoric watercraft have been reported in rivers and lakes.

The rise in sea level over the past ten thousand years has resulted in the submergence of many archaeological sites. One well-known area at the edge of the La Jolla submarine canyon has yielded more than two thousand stone bowls, from depths ranging up to eighty feet. This site is a submerged village, dated by archaeologists at four thousand to five thousand years old. A great deal of information on sea-level changes and the ancient cultures that first colonized California can be learned at such sites. John W. Foster, senior California state archaeologist, says that he has no doubt that the greatest archaeological finds of the next few decades and centuries will lie in discoveries located beneath the surface of the world’s oceans.

Fig. 1.1. These bowls are from a submerged archaeology site and speak to the sophistication and skill of the people who made them.

Along the eastern seaboard of North America, until the Younger Dryas period began around 11,500 BCE, fauna flourished in the woods, meadows, and swampy marshes. Evidence of this comes from the many remains of long-extinct species found throughout the region. In upstate New York’s Orange County alone, sixty-six sets of mastodon remains have been discovered. The earliest, discovered in the late 1700s, was visited by Thomas Jefferson, who had the skeleton put on display in Philadelphia.

In the fall of 2014 and late spring of 2015, the most recent of these discoveries was excavated by archaeologist Richard Michael Gramly, organizer of the American Society for Amateur Archaeology. It seems a farmer plowing his field north of Middletown, New York, struck something, which, upon investigation, was found to be mastodon bones. That lucky farmer then auctioned off the rights to excavate the find on his property. Gramly was hired by the highest bidder, after having been outbid himself. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work for a short time alongside Gramly and his team on this project, in the fall and spring, and can report this old bull male most likely died of natural causes (old age) and was then scavenged by humans who came along later. An intact six-foot ivory tusk was excavated along with the rest of the remains, including the scapula, shown in figures 1.2–1.5. What was most interesting about this discovery was the fact that the carcass was disarticulated, and worn, discarded bone and ivory tools were discovered associated with the remains. According to Gramly, this is the first set of mastodon remains found in North America that has evidence of human interaction. Besides being disarticulated, there was also clear evidence of chop marks, made by the tool used to dismantle the carcass, found near the upper joint of the scapula where it meets the shoulder blade. New materials were taken to replace the older, worn implements. The animal’s remains were found in black dirt typical of what was once the floor of an ancient glacial lake. It died there around 13,600 BCE, according to carbon dating.

Fig. 1.2. Richard Michael Gramly observing the scapula in situ

Many of the mastodon sites in Orange County are located very near the Dutchess Quarry Cave, an archaeological site of extreme importance and age, which holds evidence at its deepest levels of some of the earliest human occupation on the North American continent, dating to 10,000 BCE or earlier, according to Gramly and others.

In the Hudson River valley and the surrounding hills and mountains, but especially near the rivers and streams, continuous habitation zones arose where resources were plentiful and renewable. Areas along the Hudson River, where major creeks and tributaries converged and were met by land travel corridors following streams and valleys and through mountain passes and watersheds, were ripe for sustained settlement. Such areas include present-day Poughkeepsie, Wappingers Falls, Catskill, and Kingston, where the Wallkill River (which flows into the Rondout Creek), the Rondout Creek, and the Esopus Creek (all navigable waterways for small craft) empty into the Hudson. Lithic industrial production and agricultural centers arose and were continuously inhabited for as long as humans have been in the area, well over twelve thousand years. This would have been more than enough time for civilization to develop, with its sophisticated set of beliefs and ceremonial practices, including sky watching.

Fig. 1.3. Close-up of mastodon scapula in situ

Fig. 1.4. Richard Michael Gramly holding the mastodon scapula

Fig. 1.5. Mastodon scapula showed evident chop marks.

Could these Stone Age Neolithic hunters have had a hand in constructing some of the stone mounds and purposeful piles and walls found along the mountainsides and hilltops of the region? Could building in stone have been part of their belief system and practiced as an expression of those beliefs? Could evidence still exist and